A friend asked me to help him fix his computer, but I'm not sure where to begin. It's his home office computer that he keeps on most of the day as he works from home. A few days ago, his entire house experienced a power outage. Now the computer has to have the clock reset after you boot it up. And evertime you boot up it runs the hardware wizard and finds and wants to install an ethernet card - he can connect just fine to his DSL line as is. Also a couple of times it put him into the BIOS and asked to accept the default settings.

You can try resetting the CMOS (short the jumper for the cmos battery...disconnect the psu from the motherboard first, and unplug it also even before). The odds of this fixing it arent great. If he can still use the computer, good for him....but I've seen power surged computers detect ghost hardware as this seems to be doing. Actually the one Im thinking of I worked on last week, and it had had that power problem well over a year and more ago. I think it was like, just before xmas 2002.

Anyway bottom line is tell him to start doing backups of any important data he may have on there religiously, in case he needs to xfer it to a new system.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 8 guests

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot post attachments in this forum